"The etheral net is the luminosity that surrounds the
physical body,"
he explained. "The web of energy gets torn to shreds
during daily
living. Huge portions of it become lost or entwined in
other people's
bands of energy. If a person loses too much vital force, he
becomes
ill or
dies."

John Michael Abelar to Taisha Abelar
The Sorcerer's Crossing

Incense Pillow
from Alice's Restaurant

Mark Fowlkes

This was not used for supporting ones head while sleeping, but
instead was
used to scent ones hair while lying down or sleeping.

In the photo, the right-hand cylindrical object is a koro for
burning incense
woods. It is much like the ones in the large kodo sets I've
talked
about before, and the lid was removed to use it. The left-hand
cylinder is a set of stacking boxes, like the ones used in Kodo
for
the mica plates. To use this, one lit some koh in the
koro, put it in
the drawer, closed the drawer, and then layed ones long hair over
the
vents in the top of the pillow. Then, while sleeping, the hair
would
become beautifully scented. So then, this "pillow"
would be placed
behind the pillow that the head actually rested on. Neat idea,
huh?
This comes from the December 3, 1993 Sotheby's auction catalogue.
This is an 18th century piece, is 8-1/2" long, and, can you
guess the
estimated price? $50,000-60,000!!! WOW! And that was 10 years
ago,
too.

hag riding
by Lucille Clifton

why
is what i ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride

Apparently it has other good
qualities too. Murray Langham says that good quality
chocolate coats the teeth and protects them from
decay. It can also lower cholesterol.

Murray started his research
into chocolate when he noticed that many of his
hypnotherapy and counselling clients confessed to a love
of chocolate. As a joke, he started making lists of who
liked what kind of chocolate and found that the
personality traits fitted!

Basically, it boils down to
milk chocolate fanciers holding on to the past and dark
chocolate fanciers looking to the future. Also, soft
centres mean you have a soft centre; fudge means you're a
bit of a couch potato and hard centres mean that you're
go-getting and structured. Coffee flavours mean you don't
like being kept waiting.

Not really many surprises
there! However, if you change your chocolate, you can,
apparently, change your life. So if you are unstructured,
go for nuts or hard caramel. If you want more passion in
your life, go for cherry fillings; if you want to find
out more about your spiritual self, seek out the orange
cream or the Turkish delight.

Life of Pi, by
Yann Martel -- 2002 Booker Prize winner

An Excerpt

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

Academic study and the steady, mindful practice
of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have kept up what
some people would consider my strange religious practices. After
one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and
took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious
studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies
concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria,
the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology
thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the
three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour-calm,
quiet and introspective-did something to soothe my shattered
self.

There are two-toed sloths and there are
three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of
the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind
paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed
sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly
intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps
or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep
habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads,
in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red
plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place
late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with
insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word
busy here in the most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of
a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of
roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next
tree at the rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is
440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers
four to five metres in an hour.

The three-toed sloth is not well informed about
the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents
unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the
sloth's senses of taste, touch, and its sense of smell a rating
of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild,
two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then
look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should took
about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a
Magoo-like blur. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping
or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth's
slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They
are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but
Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging
to decayed branches "often".

How does it survive you might ask.

Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and
slothfulness keep it out of harm's way, away from the notice of
jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth's hairs
shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green
during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the
surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants
or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree.

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian
life in perfect harmony with its environment. "A
good-natured smile is forever on its own lips," reported
Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not
one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals,
but many a time during that month in Brazil, up at sloths in
repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in
meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense
imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.

Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of
my fellow religious-studies students-muddled agnostics who didn't
know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that
fool's gold for the bright -- reminded me of the three-toed
sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the
miracle of life, reminded me of God.

I never had problems with my fellow scientists.
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking
lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when
they are not preoccupied with science.

I was a very good student, if I may say so
myself. I was tops at St. Michael's College four years in a row.
I got every possible student award from the Department of
Zoology. If I got none from the Department of Religious Studies,
it is simply because there are no student awards in this
department (the rewards of religious study are not in mortal
hands, we all know that). I would have received the Governor
General's Academic Medal, the University of Toronto's highest
undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious
Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a beef-eating
pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of
unbearable good cheer.

I still smart a little at the slight. When you've
suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both
unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting
from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to
remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I
look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may
not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!"
The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn't
surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't
biological necessity -- it's envy. Life is so beautiful that
death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that
grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly,
losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the
passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the
Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I hope his time at
Oxford was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one
day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities
I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi,
Jerusalem and Paris.

I have nothing to say of my working life, only
that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a
man nonetheless if he's not careful.

I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the
food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver
screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even
the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It is a great
country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate,
intelligent people with bad hairdos. Anyway, I have nothing to go
home to in Pondicherry.

Richard Parker has stayed with me. I've never
forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still
see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares
tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I
still cannot understand how he could abandon me so
unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking
back even once. That pain is like an axe that chops at my heart.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital in Mexico
were incredibly kind to me. And the patients, too. Victims of
cancer or car accidents, once they heard my story, they hobbled
and wheeled over to see me, they and their families, though none
of them spoke English and I spoke no Spanish. They smiled at me,
shook my hand, patted me on the head, left gifts of food and
clothing on my bed. They moved me to uncontrollable fits of
laughing and crying.

Within a couple of days I could stand, even make
two, three steps, despite nausea, dizziness and general weakness.
Blood tests revealed that I was anemic, and that my level of
sodium was very high and my potassium low. My body retained
fluids and my legs swelled up tremendously. I looked as if I had
been grafted with a pair of elephant legs. My urine was a deep,
dark yellow going on to brown. After a week or so, I could walk
just about normally and I could wear shoes if I didn't lace them
up. My skin healed, though I still have scars on my shoulders and
back.

The first time I turned a tap on, its noisy,
wasteful, superabundant gush was such a shock that I became
incoherent and my legs collapsed beneath me and I fainted in the
arms of a nurse.

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in
Canada I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and
said, 'Fresh off the boat, are you?" I blanched. My fingers,
which a second before had been taste buds savouring the food a
little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gm. They froze
like criminals caught in the act. I didn't dare lick them. I
wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those
words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my
flesh. I picked up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used
such instruments. My hands trembled. My sambar lost its taste.

Plastic key Zen

-- (A middle-aged mom)

While I was at work one day, my five-year old was
playing in the office with a set of children's plastic keys. She
stuck the keys in my face and said, "Really you don't need
any of these keys."

Me: "You don't?"
Her: "No, you just need the love key."
Me: "What's the love key?"
Her: "It's your love."
Me: "What's it good for -- What can I open with it?"
Her: "It opens the great, big door in front of
everything."